2019 Muriel Awards: Thank you!

Well, that’s a wrap for this year’s Muriel Awards, theydies and gentlethem! Thanks to everyone who participated this year:

Josh Bell

Andrew Bemis

Christianne Benedict

Scott W. Black

Sean Burns

Kevin Cecil

Paul Clark

Dennis Cozzalio

Andrew Dignan

Kevin Dufresne

Philip Dyess-Nugent

Steven Erickson

Molly Faust

James Frazier

Kenji Fujishima

Caden Mark Gardner

Sean Gilman

Luke Gorham

Jaime Grijalba

Russell Hainline

Glenn Heath Jr.

Odie Henderson

Jenna Ipcar

Daniel Cook Johnson

Sam Juliano

Donna Kozloskie

Adam Lemke

Craig D. Lindsey

Matt Lynch

Sam C. Mac

Wendy Mays

Jeff McMahon

Patrick J. Miller

Matt Noller

Rob Patrick

Jason Shawhan

Melissa Starker

Ryan Swen

Scout Tafoya

Melissa Tamminga

Ian Scott Todd

Hedwig van Driel

Vern

Scott von Doviak

Clayton Walter

Bryan Whitefield

Brian Wilson

George Wu

See you all this summer for the Muriels Hall of Fame!

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #1

Justine Smith: “Why can’t all films be like Mad Max: Fury Road? Watching the trailers for Mad Max before it premiered, my blood pressure rose and my breath quickened. I didn’t want this to happen - experience had taught me the movie never lived up to the trailer: I was setting myself up for disappointment. But I was wrong. Mad Max delivered, and in doing so revealed that the blockbusters that I had given a pass to were not living up to their expectations, they were not delivering on their promises: we had been fooled for far too long to accept that our popular cinema was going to be mediocre at best. The straightforward way Mad Max tackles narrative and character, stripping it down to bare essentials and offering dynamic symbology was a distant memory in popular cinema. When was the last time a big budget movie wasn’t a bloated mess of fan service and convoluted story? I had forgotten it was possible for Hollywood cinema could be this good, this simple.

“Mad Max: Fury Road represents a strong vision of a dark future. Without resorting to cheap cynicism, it offers a troubling vision of a not-so-distant dystopia where environmental abuses have stripped the earth of life. Humanity has hung on by a thread, embracing water and mechanics as their new God. In an epic chase for freedom, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) tries to set free the wives of a terrifying warlord, chasing towards a remembered greenland where women reign. With a constant forward momentum, the movie drifts left to right on screen with the epicness of a classical painting. The richness of detail and strength of desperation adding levels of nuance to the deceptively simple narrative trajectory.

“Without question, Mad Max is a rare blockbuster that will pass the test of time removed from nostalgia. It is a great film that inspires tremendous emotion and doesn’t undervalue the power of great ideas.”

Andrew Bemis: ‘The straightforward way Mad Max tackles narrative and character, stripping it down to bare essentials and offering dynamic symbology was a distant memory in popular cinema.’ I want to pass this on to everyone who dismisses Fury Road as a fun action movie with no real substance, when it's actually as much a triumph of sophisticated, economical storytelling as it is on a technical level. But George Miller's approach to advancing the narrative, the characters' arcs and the story's subtext (well, text, really) is so purely visual that it doesn't always register to viewers who are used to being told, rather than shown, what a movie is about. Not that there aren't plenty of wonderful dialogue-driven movies, but Miller's approach has more in common with silent cinema than other contemporary blockbusters. A simple image like a character who realizes that she's about to die protectively clutching a bag of seeds is more powerful than a lengthy monologue about the plight of our environment could have been. The movie works as brilliantly as it does because of Miller's extraordinary trust in images and gestures (big and small) to tell a story (it helps, of course, that he has impeccable taste).

“Fury Road also makes most other blockbusters look puny on a purely aesthetic level. In a movie filled with exhilarating images, one of my favorites is towards the beginning, when Max is trying to escape his captors. It's a dark, chaotic sequence that suddenly gives way to blinding light and silence as we get our first look at Immortal Joe's Citadel. It's a moment that has the same kind of power as Dorothy opening her front door and stepping into Oz. Mad Max has many moments like this, reminding that, though blockbusters offer plenty of loud spectacle, few even bother with trying to manipulate scale, perspective, light, sound or any of the other basic tools at their disposal to create a genuine sense of awe. For a movie that uses every state-of-the-art filmmaking tool at its disposal, Fury Road is surprisingly classical in its approach to visual storytelling.”

Justine: “One of the blessings of people appreciating Fury Road is that it has really cast George Miller’s entire filmography into light, and the fact is, he has always been an economic and dynamic filmmaker. From Mad Max to Happy Feet, dialogue is sparse and used with a lot of intention. I agree, there is a lot of trust in how he treats the image. This shows not only a confidence in his own abilities, but a confidence in the audience’s abilities to understand what he’s trying to do. One of the problems with modern blockbusters is that they aim for such wide universality that they lose their personality and nuance. Films like The Avengers need to be understood in equal measure by a New Yorker and someone over in China. As a result the importance of following story and focusing on subtext gets left aside, it’s too much of a risk that the audience doesn’t understand.

“I like your comparison to The Wizard of Oz, a personal favourite of mine. As a child I’d watch it almost daily, getting lost in that world. While Mad Max may not be a ‘children’s film,’ the way it uses images and sounds to guide forward the story has a purity that could be easily understood by a child. This is why the oversimplification of Blockbusters is so frustrating, there is an easier route that doesn’t compromise story or character - Miller has proved that. Popular cinema has a way of bringing the audience on a journey. Movies like Star Wars, Jurassic Park and Mad Max have a way of inspiring the imagination and transporting us to a new and fantastic world. Mad Max has a darker bent, hidden beneath the thunderous music and fantastic universe is a dark story about oppression and personal responsibility. Mad Max was always a film about humanity’s ability to cast aside responsibility and watch the world fade to desert rather than try to fix it.

Andrew: I’m glad you brought up Happy Feet – those movies were in constant rotation on our TV when my kids were younger, and I thought I’d never want to see or think about them again. But about halfway through seeing Mad Max, I realized that it’d actually make a perfect double feature with Happy Feet Two. I don’t expect many of our readers to remember Happy Feet Two or have a strong opinion about it, but they’re basically the same movie. Also, I’m hoping Miller’s renewed popularity might inspire people to give The Witches of Eastwick, one of the first ‘grown up’ movies I loved as a kid, another look. It’s not as personal as the rest of Miller’s movies, but its ridicule of toxic masculinity points the way towards Mad Max’s full-blown assault on the patriarchy.

“As I write that, I can anticipate some readers rolling their eyes – after all, Mad Max is a car picture, not a nuanced dissection of gender roles. Its message is an all-caps cry that is literally written on a wall in the movie: ‘WHO KILLED THE WORLD?’ Men have poisoned the earth and doomed humanity, and the promise of women taking over is our only hope. It’s definitely not subtle, but it shouldn’t be. As a person who, in his most anxious moments, Googles phrases like ‘global warming worst case scenario’ late at night, Mad Max speaks to me and, oddly enough, it’s ultimately reassuring. As dark as it gets, it’s the rare post-apocalyptic movie that isn’t nihilistic. Though Miller’s vision of the future is one where much of what has been broken can’t be fixed, as long as there are people willing to work together, there’s still hope.” ~ Justine Smith and Andrew Bemis (originally posted March 6, 2016)

Note: Mad Max: Fury Road ranked #1 in the 2015 Muriel Awards.

Muriel’s Top 25 films of the 2010s

1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, George Miller) [250/16]

2. The Tree of Life (2011, Terrence Malick) [202/12]

3. Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho) [176/13]

4. The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson) [162/11]

5. The Social Network (2010, David Fincher) [158/11]

6. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel and Ethan Coen) [155/13]

7. Moonlight (2016, Barry Jenkins) [143/10]

8. Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer) [133/11]

9. Carol (2015, Todd Haynes) [130/9]

10. Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan) [125/9]

11. Holy Motors (2012, Léos Carax) [124/8]

12. Phantom Thread (2017, Paul Thomas Anderson) [119/8]

13. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013, Martin Scorsese) [116/10]

14. Certified Copy (2010, Abbas Kiarostami) [116/8]

15. Get Out (2017, Jordan Peele) [110/9]

16. The Act of Killing (2012, Joshua Oppenheimer & Cynthia Cynn and [anonymous]) [110/16]

17. Meek’s Cutoff (2010, Kelly Reichardt) [94/7]

18. Inherent Vice (2014, Paul Thomas Anderson) [87/6]

19. Roma (2018, Alfonso Cuaron) [81/6]

20 (tie). A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi) [77/6]

20 (tie). Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater) [77/6]

22 (tie). Before Midnight (2013, Richard Linklater) [76/5]

22 (tie). The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Wes Anderson) [76/5]

24. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, Quentin Tarantino) [74/6]

25. Paterson (2016, Jim Jarmusch) [71/5]

Italics denote winners of the Golden Muriel for Best Picture.

Click here for complete results.

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #2

"When you watch The Tree of Life, you’re seeing a vision of a family’s life experienced with an other-wordly, unfathomable sense of perspective. Writer/director Terrence Malick’s latest film is elusive, engrossing and just all-around big. There are discernible leitmotifs that run through the film, like the intrusion of chaos into order, the gentle realization that form does not always conform to essence, and the fleeting presence of radiant, context-free hopefulness.

“But the sense of spirituality that characterizes The Tree of Life is nothing if not pantheistic and all-accommodating. It’s an open container of meaning, which is partly why the film a minor cultural rift when it was first released last year. Some dismissed The Tree of Life by saying it was loaded with pretentious assumptions, specifically accusing of him of assuming the position of God in his film. Others said that the film’s vision of faith was too simplistic and that the film just regurgitates/reinforces Judeo-Christian imagery. So many of the film's most staunch defenders foolishly tried to combat this short-sighted criticism, but defending The Tree of Life against such claims is patently unnecessary: the complexities inherent in Malick’s film are defense enough.

“For example, in the opening image of the diametrically-opposed ways of grace and nature, Malick sets up and then exponentially complicates the notion that lived spirituality is inseparable from idealized faith. The two states of mind are opposite sides of the same state. The film’s protagonists are thus not totally in control of their memories, nor are they totally passive participants in the film’s dream-like reverie of past events. The Tree of Life presents the past as it might have been, not as it objectively occurred. We see events through the eyes of man-made Gods, the mother and father (Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt) of two children. One boy is dead while the other boy, now a man, wonders when it was that he first believed in God. And he seeks Him out again. And so does his mother.

“So, when one of the two boys asks, ‘Where do you live?’ he’s living the answer: in memories, in the past, in the design that unites the two and in dreams of simplicity and twilit beauty. God is fallible because he is us but He also exists outside of us. According to the film, the fact that we cannot always be united is what alternately motivates us towards and pulls us away from our faith. There is both great faith in doubt and in the presence of God in Malick’s latest masterpiece. It’s alternately a mirror of actively evolving ideas of the past and a flood of emotions that create its own order out of the inherently chaotic. Wow." ~ Simon Abrams (originally posted March 4, 2012)

Note: The Tree of Life ranked #1 in the 2011 Muriel Awards.

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #3

“Parasite doesn’t exactly redefine the concept of the upstairs-downstairs satire so much as it infuses it with a dark-hued clarity about class structure, and it refuses to condemn anyone involved in navigating the implacable two-way system of social mobility it so pitilessly portrays, even if several of the key navigators might not be left standing by the film’s final fade. Bong Joon-ho’s previous, and horizontally oriented, Snowpiercer grappled with similar notions of imposed privilege and struggle, depicting an oppressed class’s attempts to move forward and depose the tyrannical political system keeping them at bay on a futuristic train hurtling through a forbidding, iced-over landscape, but with a far heavier touch. As Parasite’s Kim Ki-woo, the young man whose family occupies the charred heart of Bong’s unforgiving worldview, might say, that’s so metaphorical!

“Eschewing Snowpiercer’s more linear ham-handedness, Bong conjures this new film, which posits a social purgatory up from which the Kim family desperately (and literally) has to climb in concocting a scheme for survival which will prove to be both understandable and fatally flawed, with insouciance and acid purpose. Parasite’s protagonists, the denizens of a partially submerged basement apartment whose windows look directly out into the gutters of a crowded and filthy urban street, are looking for any way to survive. They stumble upon a way to insinuate themselves into a home of the Parks, a super-rich family residing in the hills, where Bong’s social critique is allowed to develop the real, sharp teeth laying in patient wait behind the good-natured smile of its opening third. There may be several moments during Parasite when Ki-woo’s astonished observation may be just as apt, but the movie’s built-in auto-critique defuses the relative obviousness of Bong’s dramatic strategies by serving them up with healthy doses of empathy and humor. By the point when the wealthy Park family takes off for a weekend camping trip, leaving the run of their spacious and modern mansion to the Kims, you can practically taste the glee with which Bong has taken to ensure that the hooks are in his audience, who will likely have no idea of the depths to which his demonically entertaining film is about to plunge them.

“2019 was widely considered to be a very good, very diverse year for movies, and even with all those great films to talk about, it still became the year of Parasite. Somehow, amongst strong, heavily praised work from Martin Scorsese, Terence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and a host of other celebrated directors, Bong Joon-ho’s film managed to secure close to a consensus among the most opinionated observers of film as the clear choice for the year’s best. The most award-averse among us would have never been able to predict it, even as Parasite emerged as a triumphant Palme D’Or winner from last year’s Cannes Film Festival, but one still has to wonder with delight just how Oscar managed to get it so right this year. You might have to go all the way back to 2007 and the decisive win of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men to come up with a more unlikely, more existentially despairing, and more completely right choice for the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year, despite what our orange-colored Film Critic in Chief thinks. (‘How bad were the Academy Awards this year? Did you see it?’ Trump recently asked a jeering crowd at one of his rallies. ‘And the winner is… a movie from South Korea! What the hell was that all about? We got enough problems with South Korea with trade. On top of it, they give him best movie of the year? Was it good? I don’t know.’)

“But Trump’s cynical derision might inadvertently be more reflective of Bong’s point than 45 could ever understand. Fittingly, a movie about corrosive social division, division which stands as the norm in which all of us, rich and poor, might seem hopelessly mired, has become a massive worldwide hit at the same time those very same divisions are being sown for political and financial profit by bureaucratic hacks and the dangerous demagogues they empower. Who’s playing whom?

“Parasite ends on a note of desperate fantasy, detailing the musings of a young man who can only concoct elaborate projections of his own ultimate wealth and economic rescue conjured to assuage the guilt he feels over his family’s devastation and the cloistered imprisonment of his father. And that young man cannot sustain believe in those fantasies for more than a moment at a time before sinking back down into the cruel subterranean misery where we first saw him at the beginning of the film. The final descent of the camera which concludes Parasite, in what might be a prelude to genuine madness, is a cold slap of reality, what Bong Joon-ho has described as ‘a sure-fire kill,’ even as it displays the razor-sharp instincts of a born storyteller employed to send an audience back into the world exhilarated, on a melancholic contact high from 135-minutes proximity to absolute filmmaking mastery. When I jotted down my thoughts about the movie after seeing Parasite for the first time, the notion that it might be, on its own terms, a perfect movie occurred to me more than once. Five months, three screenings, and four Academy Awards later, nothing much has made me think to change my mind. It’s a sure-fire kill in just about every way.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio

Note: Parasite ranked #1 in the 2019 Muriel Awards.

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #4

"The opening quote of Tom Brokaw's oft-read The Greatest Generation is by FDR: ‘This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.’ The epochs of The Great Depression and WWII led to a deep anti-intellectual conformism, which only cracked during the horrendous foreign policy adventures in Indochina in the late 1960s. What was told, which most of us know to be false, is that the branding of stoic masculinity breeding, and hard work to achieve our own pocket-sized utopias was within arm's length; if we can destroy the Nazis and neuter the Soviets, anything is possible. And unfortunately, in popular culture, this was reinforced, with some exceptions (Ray's Bigger Than Life a clear standout).

“The Master, then, feels like a lost narrative, but one of such familiarity that most who came of age even generations after the so-called ‘Greatest’ will experience déjà vu. This post-WWII world is hyper-sexualized, moralistic but with arguments held together by scotch tape and intoxicated on cheap cult theories, politics and booze. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix, in his best performance) slips through the cracks during the Eisenhower years: he can barely contain his nervous rage, constantly running from the jobs he's holding and eventually finding himself in the palm of a contrarian crackpot's hand, Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). It is here that the film's greatest mystery lies: what does Quell find in Dodd, and vice versa, that binds them so tightly? Why is Quell at the mercy of a pseudo-science patriarch and Dodd with such an elusive, anti-authoritarian, feral creature? Wouldn't narrative traditions suggest that there ought to be some kind of compliment here?

“Except that this is a film built on anti-compliments. How else to explain the unusual use of 70mm? The visual palate of the most generous and expansive of formats here is not of long panoramic vistas, but of medium shots and close ups, many times of faces, and often times using an extremely shallow depth of field, smudging foreground action into out of focus, shadowy blotches of color. Jonny Greenwood's score is also in this vein; its cues are, except in a few occasions, placed in transition scenes, unlike the operatic sonic blasts of his work in There Will Be Blood. But mostly, this is, like his masterpiece Punch-Drunk Love, director Paul Thomas Anderson taking an opportunity to complicate genres and filmmaking eras evoked by pitting anti-heroes (Adam Sandler in the Lewis/Tati tradition, Phoenix in the Phil Karlson/Nic Ray tradition) into an revisionist narrative.

“Back to déjà vu, though: The Master is something entirely singular in Anderson's body of work, closer to the revisionist historical cinema of Full Metal Jacket, Zodiac, Doomed Love and The House of Mirth. Which is to say: these histories are able to be experienced as a consciousness. With WWII, drifters are societal anomalies, bellwethers of a failure to suppress something else other than what was acceptable. There's a reason why these films stand out, which may say a lot about the times we live in and the years in which each of the films mentioned were made than the times depicted on screen. The Master, set during a period of ‘forward-thinking’ capitalism, finds its elliptical narrative footing in the self-doubting head of a broken, rugged failure, whose primal, sexual impulses supersede any kind of professional or ideological adult conformism that our culture digests as pamphleteered self-fulfillment." ~ Michael Lieberman (originally posted February 23, 2013)

Note: The Master ranked #3 in the 2012 Muriel Awards.

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #5

"For a long time before The Social Network was released, people just called it ‘The Facebook Movie’ -- even after the inspired trailer (the one that combined footage from the movie with Facebook screenshots and a choir singing Radiohead's ‘Creep’) made it clearer that it dealt with the human stories behind how the social networking site was created.

“I joked that the studio should adopt the approach used in the famous trailer for Stanley Kubrick's Lolita in 1962: ‘How did they ever make a movie of Facebook?’ That turns out to be the title of the ‘making o’" documentary on the extras DVD (the people who made this movie have an exceptionally sharp sense of humor). Since it opened the New York Film Festival in October, it's been described as a ruthless ladder-to-success story, a thwarted romance (with Erica or Eduardo?), a courtroom drama, a fast-moving portrait of a generation and The Way We Live Now -- and ‘a movie about 2.0 people made by 1.0 people’ (that last comment written by a person still in beta, apparently).

“Is it any of those things -- or all of those things? I don't think we know yet. As the movie's Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) says of the newly launched Facebook to his friend and CFO Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield): ‘We don't even know what it is yet. We don't know what it is, what it can be, what it will be.’ That may be the smartest thing Mark says in the movie, and I think it may apply to The Social Network itself -- a deceptively conventional film that races by at such high-bandwidth speeds that even after you've seen it, you may not be sure you know what you've seen. I've seen it only twice (though I've gone over individual scenes in shot-by-shot detail), but I feel like it's been downloaded into my brain and I'm still trying to process it. What I know for sure is that it's exquisitely designed and thrilling to engage with. (John Paylus was absolutely right to compare Fincher's direction with Jonathan Ive's designs of Apple products.)

“Actually, there's a kernel of truth to that ‘1.0 vs. 2.0’ comment: the visual grammar of The Social Network is fairly traditional. Establishing shots, two-shots, reverse angles, limited use of steady dollies and cranes rather than shakycams and extended takes. (Though, as I learned from the DVD supplements, the shot over which the title appears is really several shots stitched together.) The difference is the rapid speed at which they are deployed, and the effortlessness with which the movie delivers multiple streams of information.

“Unlike that other 2010 movie that made such a big deal of explaining arbitrary rules for getting from one level of storytelling to another, The Social Network just does it. And you get it -- without the actors reading you instruction manuals encoded into dialog. It shifts backward, forward, sideways in time and space (with no ‘present tense’ defined), through depositions, memories, e-mails, affidavits... and you may get temporarily/temporally thrown now and again, but it's not hard to follow. Again, unlike the science-fiction movie that preceded it into theaters in 2010, The Social Network is complex without trying to appear complicated. Indeed, its design and direction, the tools of its tale-spinning, are far more sophisticated, but less ostentatious. And more fun. And lead to a better life." ~ Jim Emerson (originally posted March 6, 2011)

Note: The Social Network ranked #1 in the 2010 Muriel Awards.

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #6

"If you ask me, I could write a book about Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis. I say that about each new Coen brothers movie (and, yes, I know Rodgers & Hart’s 1940 ‘I Can Write a Book’ is not a folk song), but in this case I use the phrase to point out that it’s a movie that lends itself to considerable rumination and explication (and appreciation), which is probably easier to do at book-length than in just a few paragraphs. But here goes:

“Inside Llewyn Davis is the only 2013 movie that I’ve watched more than twice. I think it’s been three or four times now. It’s certainly lovely to look at, while appropriately chilly with its moody blacks, blues, browns and greys (thanks, Bruno Delbonnel and Peter Doyle). The music (whether sung — always live — by the title character, Oscar Isaac, or Justin Timberlake or Carey Mulligan) is hauntingly gorgeous and sometimes so unspeakably haunting it raises goosebumps — which is often the case when the Coens work with frequent collaborators Carter Burwell and T Bone Burnett. And though I wouldn’t call it a flat-out comedy (like, say, The Big Lebowski or O Brother Where Art Thou?), it’s occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, especially when John Goodman or F. Murray Abraham are on the screen.

“It’s all very loosely based on The Mayor of MacDougal Street, the posthumously published 2005 memoir by Dave Van Ronk about his days and nights in the early-‘60s Greenwich Village folk revival scene. All of which is to say that Inside Llewyn Davis (title and album cover patterned after the 1962 Prestige LP, Inside Dave Van Ronk) is richly entertaining in multifarious ways.

“It begins with a close-up of a microphone and a long close-up take of Llewyn singing an old folk song, ‘Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,’ in a dark club known as the Gaslight Cafe. He’s told someone is waiting for him in the alley out back and a man in a black coat and wide-brimmed fedora punches him out. The movie then dissolves back in time to reveal (in its own good time) how Llewyn came to be punched. So, there’s that — a structural/narrative hook that teases us along through the story. We soon find that we can easily understand why somebody — anybody — would be likely to take a swing this guy. He’s a singer, but not exactly an entertainer — talented as hell, but he doesn’t exactly ‘connect’ with people, from the stage or in his daily life.

“There are so many ways to look at the movie. Watch how Llewyn uses his music as a tool: a weapon, a shield, a challenge, a payment, a bribe, a gift, a meal ticket, a proof of authenticity, an apology... You could see it as a kind of Raging Bull with an acoustic musician instead of a boxer, a man so steeped in pride and self-loathing that his life has become an effort to build a monument to his own iconoclasm and unlovability, cloaked in a form of non-careerist ideological purity.

“And then there’s the cat, an orange tabby we (and Llewyn) belatedly find out is named Ulysses. He takes us on quite an odyssey, leading us back in time, through the Village streets and into the subway, and eventually all the way to Chicago. Who is this cat and what is he doing here? That’s a good excuse for another viewing..." ~ Jim Emerson (originally posted March 9, 2014)

Note: Inside Llewyn Davis ranked #4 in the 2013 Muriel Awards.

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #7

“Moonlight is a gloriously, painfully romantic film set in modern-day Miami, following the early life of Little (Alex R. Hibbert), a black gay kid growing up in the hood. Moonlight may be about as modern as a film can get, yet it's reminiscent of classic Hollywood love stories. Moonlight's days are infused with the hot yellow-white of the sun, at once beautiful and unforgiving, and at night, the deepest black of the sky framing the harsh glow from urban streetlights. Throughout are the bright colors of a fable, tiny splashes of aqua and red and gold, royal colors to remind us of ancient tales of romantic conquest. Thanks to director Barry Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton, the film boasts the confidence of long takes in everyday locations, lingering stills in a religious Renaissance style, and deliberate use of washed-out color and unsynchronized sound, knowing that these techniques could easily be blamed on the film's low budget, but doing it anyway, fearlessly, the film's construction mirroring the emotional growth of the young boy whose story it tells.

“Little, about 10 years old when the film opens, struggles with poverty, bullies, and a mother falling into drug abuse, while local drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali) and fellow student Kevin (Jaden Piner) help him navigate a harsh world, in their way. Kevin kindly offers to help toughen Little up by teaching him how to fight; several years later, Kevin does it again, but not kindly, and not until after he and Little, now known by his given name Chiron, have had a fleeting romantic night together on the beach. The third panel of this cinematic triptych finds a 30-something Chiron, again renamed, this time as Black (Trevante Rhodes), driving his way back to Miami after an unexpected call from Kevin (André Holland).

“Just as in classic Hollywood romances, the characters in Moonlight move like they're in a musical, deliberately and gracefully, as the passage of time speeds up and slows down and the space around them bends and stretches, having broken completely free of the science that explains it, instead being powered by the sheer will of emotion. The old-fashioned romance genre is used in a very modern set of circumstances, where traditional tropes -- coming-of-age, lost love, loneliness -- are recontextualized within non-traditional realities such as homophobia, institutionalized racism, violence and poverty. The big minds at the big studios would surely have passed on such a tale, thinking that its themes would alienate most audiences, when in fact the opposite is true: Moonlight is universal.

“That's not to say the film bypasses cinema's past altogether. The adult Kevin is a cook at a diner, something that can't help but be a nod to the dozens of black actors who spent entire decades-long careers playing nothing but background characters in service positions. How many films came out of Hollywood where the only black character was a diner cook or a porter or a butler, who often didn't even have a word of dialogue? Hollywood for decades, and even to an extent now, has contempt for both the non-white actor and the real-world people in the service industry they play.

“In Moonlight, the adult Kevin, whose job at the diner is more about slinging hash than haute cuisine, is a success story, and that success story is both social commentary and a show of the character's strength. At the same time it acknowledges the scores of underdeveloped characters just like him in films of the past, chiding those films a little, asking how dare they consider this job some little nothing that never mattered. It did matter. It always mattered. And here we see, in terms that cannot be denied, that cooking is care and it is love, and you don't have to be of a certain Hollywood-approved demographic for that to be true.

“On the surface, Moonlight sounds like a social commentary film, and it is to a certain degree, but it's also a fine example of modern independent filmmaking that has been deeply influenced by the classics. It's the kind of film that would have been relegated to a specific genre not that long ago -- LGBT film, or black film, or indie film -- and to an extent, it's a bit of a surprise that it wasn't this year, but if nothing else, we should know by now that with Moonlight, the rules very happily do not apply.”~ Stacia Jones (originally posted March 5, 2017)

Note: Moonlight ranked #3 in the 2016 Muriel Awards.

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #8

"The covert and beguiling Under the Skin rattled me to my core. The film is, first and foremost, image-centric storytelling, with roots in experimental cinema, that distances itself from mankind. Birth to death, human as alien, alien as human. Firmly divided into two parts, routine and the failing quest for basic human pleasures, with the key transitional scene being the Laura’s (nobody has any names, including Laura, but she’s billed as such so it’s just easier for me to follow suit) (Scarlett Johansson) encounter with a man with neurofibromatosis. Before that, she goes about her business, luring and leading men into an abstract and oily black digestive space. There’s no connection between her and her body, her victims, or feelings. But gradually the loneliness starts to sink in, and with it the isolation that humans may experience. She begins to seek out basic human pleasures like eating, sex, and companionship, inquisitive and nervous like a child. She knows she needs something, but is unsure how to go about it.

"When Under the Skin ended, I felt like I’d been scooped out from the inside. It’s one of the saddest and loneliest films I’ve ever seen. Scarlett Johansson is mainly a presence for the first half, removed and captivating. And then in the second half she is heartbreaking; confused, yearning and unfulfilled. The final minutes, in which she is pursued by a man in the musky never-ending forest, is so palpable; you can feel her fear. Predator to prey. The second she desires the human instinct she loses so much agency. She becomes vulnerable and susceptible, her lair further and further away, unable to reconcile that yearning. We sense the irreparable loss of that center, her time dwindling. My boyfriend found something peaceful about the one-with-the-snow ending, but I didn’t. I just can’t; it’s not in my nature.

"The formalism contributes to a new withdrawn perspective of ourselves, as something Other and incomprehensible. The thick Scottish accents further that distance, as does Mica Levi’s slinky and exotic high-pitched string score, and the sound design where much is compressed and blanketed over. Take for instance, as an example of said withdrawn perspective, the way Glazer shoots the scene on the beach, in which attempted rescue causes a chain reaction of familial death, a wailing abandoned baby as sole survivor. Laura, and thus we, take all of it in at once and for what it is (death) with unfeeling coldness. The discrepancy between what is happening, and how we see it, is very disturbing. And then Laura murders a man with a rock, and it’s the opposite of how murder is usually depicted in film. There is no close-up, no sound effect, and no clear view because Laura is crouching with her back to us. The impact of the scene is that there is no impact, and that lack of impact in turn translates to its own unique impact for the audience.

"The film does not pass judgment on Laura. As she observes us, we observe her, and ourselves through her. Another layer to this is gradually added when Laura begins to observe herself, in a successive set of mirror scenes as she considers her new form. This observation becomes out-of-body in the end. No mirror is needed in her last moments.

"Generally, I think more filmmakers and producers need to put their trust in the communicative power of the image (and in viewers), especially since it’s what the medium inherently is to begin with. Under the Skin hypnotically uses impressionistic imagery and Scarlett Johansson’s face as narrative (there is very little dialogue overall) for a final product about existential isolation and irreconcilable cognizance that I still haven’t been able to shake." ~ Catherine Stebbins (previously posted March 8, 2015, edited from an essay posted on May 2, 2014; used by permission of the author)

Note: Under the Skin ranked #2 in the 2014 Muriel Awards.

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #9

“Their eyes meet across a crowded floor, and in an instant everything changes. That's about as cliché as cliché can get, but In Todd Haynes’ mid-century love story, Carol, the story is less about any ‘will they, or won’t they’ dramatic tension, and more a quiet, and persistent damnation of a world which two women are forced to sublimate their true selves beneath the overpowering weight of social expectations.

“The world in which Carol resides could have come straight from a fashion magazine. Interiors are, initially, *perfect* - the woods are warm, the surfaces shiny and unblemished, with a flattering light caressing clothing that always manages to hang just so. It is a vision of America all too familiar to those of a conservative mindset; an 8 x 10 glossy homage to a capitalist perfection that sure looks pretty from a few decades down the road, but only if you willfully choose to ignore the very uncomfortable realities that lay beneath.

“It is within this reality that we find our two heroines. Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), is a young woman on the cusp of self-discovery, a budding photographer with a disaffected love life. She is working at a department store when she first catches a glimpse of Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a vision in furs that moves through the store with an impeccable grace – ‘as swans in the evening move o’er the lake’ – slapping her empty gloves against her hands as if mildly irritated to be gracing the room with her very presence. Therese is instantly smitten, and a delicate dance of seduction begins.

“In these scenes of courtship, Haynes uses the art of cinema to fantastic effect. His camera catches the furtive glances, fleeting touches, and unspoken communication of lovers learning the boundaries of each other. Simultaneously, his camera guides us to the realization that much of these women’s lives are lived under the auspices of a subtle schizophrenia; that their everyday actions are performances for critics who may not have always been in the room, but whose merciless opinions were always deeply feared, and carried the power to destroy. Therese, by virtue of her youth and inexperience, may appear to be less bound by the societal pressures both women are acutely aware of, but nonetheless knows that certain observances must be made. Carol, on the other hand, has been playing her part for so long, that her immersion has become all but absolute. She has nearly lost herself in the role she’s been forced to play, and it is only when circumstances finally hit critical mass that the socially acceptable façade she’s so carefully constructed crumbles into dust.

“It is here that the real Carol, the heart and soul of Carol, emerges. The moment is devastating to behold (and a testament to the Blanchett’s emotional control), a cri de Coeur of epic proportions almost impossible to bear in its emotional nakedness. It is a moment that will have a profound effect on the lives of our heroines, the beginning of an end for a way of life that never actually existed, and the dawn of an era in which the truth walks hand-in-hand with the present.” ~ Donald G. Carder (originally posted March 6, 2016)

Note: Carol ranked #2 in the 2015 Muriel Awards.

2010s Best Films of the Decade - #10

Note: Instead of requesting original pieces for this countdown, I will be re-posting essays that were written for the film’s year of release. All essays are reposted with permission from the authors. That’s how we roll here at the Muriels.

"Perhaps the time for a properly considered assessment of Margaret will come with its upcoming home-video release -— away from its fraught production history, away from the bitter legal issues still surrounding the film, away from Fox Searchlight’s attempts to quietly bury it with an extremely limited token release, away from the #teammargaret cause that sprouted up on Twitter to get more film critics to be able to see it and champion it. Home video may be the only way that the many outside of certain major film cites who have merely heard about Kenneth Lonergan’s sophomore film maudit will finally get to see it for themselves, and perhaps by then the hoopla will have died down enough for the film to be considered on its own terms. Who knows? Maybe, by the time it does get a home-video release, we will all be able to see it in a form closer to Lonergan’s original intentions.

“Even in the unabashedly messy 150-minute theatrical version that inspired all that ink to be spilled for and against it, however, Margaret remains, to these eyes, a considerable achievement: a work of enormous thematic ambition that adds up to more than the sum of its often-impressive parts and is a deeply moving experience besides.

Here is a film that is not content to simply tell a straightforward story of a teenager, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin, in a majestic performance), dealing with the traumatic after-effects of witnessing a woman perish right in her arms as the result of a traffic accident she inadvertently helped cause. Lonergan, instead, blows his narrative up into a complex portrait of an adolescent not only coming to grips with this particular death but also with everything in the adult world she has yet to fully grasp. Broadly speaking, Lisa’s angst-filled journey toward some kind of personal redemption touches on matters of ethics, morality, class differences and even art; unavoidably, she comes up against moral gray areas and emotional complexities that can’t help but confound her sheltered upper-class existence and her increasingly spiraling-out-of-control sense of right and wrong. Margaret isn’t just meant to be universal in scope, however; Lonergan, for instance, includes earnest classroom-discussion scenes in which students often heatedly discuss worldly post-9/11 implications, suggesting he wants his tale to be clearly situated in a topical context.

“All of that is enough to fuel two or three films’ worth of drama; that Lonergan tries to cram it all into this one means Margaret sometimes admittedly comes off messy and unwieldy. But, even at its least coherent, Lonergan has genuine insights into human nature to back up his ambitions. Margaret is, in part, about the ways we all see ourselves as the stars of our own personal dramas, to the point that good intentions sometimes can shade dangerously into self-involvement. During the film’s last hour, Lisa gets caught up in the U.S. legal system when she tries to help the accident victim’s best friend, Emily (Jeannie Berlin), sue the MTA for negligence -— but is she doing it out of pure altruism, or is this just a cover for a pained attempt to assuage her own guilty conscience? Lonergan wisely allows both possibilities to hang in the air; his film freely swims in the complexities of character, and the film is all the richer for it.

“What ultimately dazzles about Margaret is an overriding sense of a film borne out of what feels like bitter experience on the part of its maker — a work that feels torn, bleeding, from Lonergan’s heart. And that, among other reasons, is why its ending is as emotionally soaring as it is. Set during a live Metropolitan Opera performance of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta The Tales of Hoffman, it depicts a catharsis for both Lisa and her mother that may not mean anything to the many opera-goers surrounding them but certainly mean the world to them both and to us as well. Even after all that Lisa has gone through in the course of this particularly exhausting period of time, she has the power to respond passionately to even something as seemingly unrelated to her current circumstances as The Tales of Hoffman —- and, considering how much we in the audience have been privy to regarding her emotional struggles, we find ourselves thoroughly understanding the experience that informs her passionate reaction. It’s unavoidable that everyone brings their own personal baggage to the way he/she responds to a work of art; more than any other film I can think of, Margaret vividly conveys the process by which one individual develops the kind of life experience that can’t help but affect one’s own perspective on art. That is not a small thing for a film to accomplish; the fact that this is merely the least of the film’s accomplishments is proof that Margaret, warts and all, is a film to value and treasure."~ Kenji Fujishima (originally posted March 4, 2012)

Note: Margaret ranked #10 in the 2011 Muriel Awards.

2010 Decade Awards - Favorite Performances and Directors

Muriel’s Favorite Performances of the 2010s

1. Philip Seymour Hoffman – The Master [110 points / 11 votes]

2. Leonardo DiCaprio – The Wolf of Wall Street [87/10]

3. Denis Lavant – Holy Motors [87/8]

4. Daniel Day-Lewis – Lincoln [84/7]

5. Joaquin Phoenix – The Master [80/6]

6. Ethan Hawke – First Reformed [62.5/6]

7. Jesse Eisenberg – The Social Network [61/6]

8. Oscar Isaac – Inside Llewyn Davis [60/6]

9. Juliette Binoche – Certified Copy [60/5]

10. Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread [58/6]

11. Charlize Theron – Mad Max: Fury Road [53.5/5]

12. Jake Gyllenhaal – Nightcrawler [52.5/5]

13. Lupita Nyong’o – Us [51/6]

14 (tie). Rooney Mara – Carol [45.5/5]

14 (tie). Isabelle Huppert – Elle [45.5/5]

16. Scarlett Johansson – Under the Skin [45/4]

17. Marion Cotillard – Two Days, One Night [44/4]

18. Joaquin Phoenix – Inherent Vice [41.5/5]

19 (tie). Charlize Theron – Young Adult [40/4]

19 (tie). Vicky Krieps – Phantom Thread [40/4]

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Muriel’s Favorite Directors of the 2010s

1. Paul Thomas Anderson [97 points / 14 votes]

2. Martin Scorsese [62/9]

3. Richard Linklater [44/7]

4. Quentin Tarantino [42/7]

5. Terrence Malick [41/6]

6. Hong Sang-soo [39/6]

7 (tie). Bong Joon-ho [31/5]

7 (tie). David Fincher [31/5]

7 (tie). Barry Jenkins [31/5]

10. Noah Baumbach [27/4]

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2019 Muriel Awards: Best Documentary

1. Apollo 11 [60 points / 14 votes]

2. Honeyland [30/8]

3. Rolling Thunder Revue [27/7]

4 (tie). American Factory [21/5]

4 (tie). The Image Book [21/5]

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2019 Muriel Awards: All the other awards we gave to Parasite

Best Director – The Finalists

1. Bong Joon-ho – Parasite [206 points / 30 votes]

2. Martin Scorsese – The Irishman [133/22]

3. Quentin Tarantino – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood [98/14]

4. Greta Gerwig – Little Women [83/14]

5. Josh and Benny Safdie – Uncut Gems [71/11]

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Best Screenplay – The Finalists

1. Parasite – Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won [196/29]

2. Little Women – Greta Gerwig [136/22]

3. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – Quentin Tarantino [124/18]

4. The Irishman – Steven Zaillian [118/20]

5. Knives Out – Rian Johnson [80/13]

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Best Ensemble Performance – The Finalists

1. Parasite [220/34]

2. The Irishman [162/24]

3. Little Women [152/25]

4. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood [135/21]

5. Knives Out [93/16]

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Best Editing – The Finalists

1. Parasite – Yang Jin-mo [182/29]

2. The Irishman – Thelma Schoonmaker [155/25]

3. Uncut Gems – Ronald Bronstein and Benny Safdie [138/22]

4. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – Fred Raskin [109/18]

5. Little Women – Nick Houy [67/12]

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2019 Muriel Awards: And the Golden Muriel for Best Picture goes to...

“Parasite doesn’t exactly redefine the concept of the upstairs-downstairs satire so much as it infuses it with a dark-hued clarity about class structure, and it refuses to condemn anyone involved in navigating the implacable two-way system of social mobility it so pitilessly portrays, even if several of the key navigators might not be left standing by the film’s final fade. Bong Joon-ho’s previous, and horizontally oriented, Snowpiercer grappled with similar notions of imposed privilege and struggle, depicting an oppressed class’s attempts to move forward and depose the tyrannical political system keeping them at bay on a futuristic train hurtling through a forbidding, iced-over landscape, but with a far heavier touch. As Parasite’s Kim Ki-woo, the young man whose family occupies the charred heart of Bong’s unforgiving worldview, might say, that’s so metaphorical!

“Eschewing Snowpiercer’s more linear ham-handedness, Bong conjures this new film, which posits a social purgatory up from which the Kim family desperately (and literally) has to climb in concocting a scheme for survival which will prove to be both understandable and fatally flawed, with insouciance and acid purpose. Parasite’s protagonists, the denizens of a partially submerged basement apartment whose windows look directly out into the gutters of a crowded and filthy urban street, are looking for any way to survive. They stumble upon a way to insinuate themselves into a home of the Parks, a super-rich family residing in the hills, where Bong’s social critique is allowed to develop the real, sharp teeth laying in patient wait behind the good-natured smile of its opening third. There may be several moments during Parasite when Ki-woo’s astonished observation may be just as apt, but the movie’s built-in auto-critique defuses the relative obviousness of Bong’s dramatic strategies by serving them up with healthy doses of empathy and humor. By the point when the wealthy Park family takes off for a weekend camping trip, leaving the run of their spacious and modern mansion to the Kims, you can practically taste the glee with which Bong has taken to ensure that the hooks are in his audience, who will likely have no idea of the depths to which his demonically entertaining film is about to plunge them.

“2019 was widely considered to be a very good, very diverse year for movies, and even with all those great films to talk about, it still became the year of Parasite. Somehow, amongst strong, heavily praised work from Martin Scorsese, Terence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and a host of other celebrated directors, Bong Joon-ho’s film managed to secure close to a consensus among the most opinionated observers of film as the clear choice for the year’s best. The most award-averse among us would have never been able to predict it, even as Parasite emerged as a triumphant Palme D’Or winner from last year’s Cannes Film Festival, but one still has to wonder with delight just how Oscar managed to get it so right this year. You might have to go all the way back to 2007 and the decisive win of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men to come up with a more unlikely, more existentially despairing, and more completely right choice for the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year, despite what our orange-colored Film Critic in Chief thinks. (‘How bad were the Academy Awards this year? Did you see it?’ Trump recently asked a jeering crowd at one of his rallies. ‘And the winner is… a movie from South Korea! What the hell was that all about? We got enough problems with South Korea with trade. On top of it, they give him best movie of the year? Was it good? I don’t know.’)

“But Trump’s cynical derision might inadvertently be more reflective of Bong’s point than 45 could ever understand. Fittingly, a movie about corrosive social division, division which stands as the norm in which all of us, rich and poor, might seem hopelessly mired, has become a massive worldwide hit at the same time those very same divisions are being sown for political and financial profit by bureaucratic hacks and the dangerous demagogues they empower. Who’s playing whom?

“Parasite ends on a note of desperate fantasy, detailing the musings of a young man who can only concoct elaborate projections of his own ultimate wealth and economic rescue conjured to assuage the guilt he feels over his family’s devastation and the cloistered imprisonment of his father. And that young man cannot sustain believe in those fantasies for more than a moment at a time before sinking back down into the cruel subterranean misery where we first saw him at the beginning of the film. The final descent of the camera which concludes Parasite, in what might be a prelude to genuine madness, is a cold slap of reality, what Bong Joon-ho has described as ‘a sure-fire kill,’ even as it displays the razor-sharp instincts of a born storyteller employed to send an audience back into the world exhilarated, on a melancholic contact high from 135-minutes proximity to absolute filmmaking mastery. When I jotted down my thoughts about the movie after seeing Parasite for the first time, the notion that it might be, on its own terms, a perfect movie occurred to me more than once. Five months, three screenings, and four Academy Awards later, nothing much has made me think to change my mind. It’s a sure-fire kill in just about every way.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio

Muriel’s Top 25 Films of 2019

1. Parasite [366 points / 32 votes]

2. The Irishman [292/27]

3. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood [253.5/23]

4. Uncut Gems [217.5/24]

5. Little Women [172/18]

6. Portrait of a Lady on Fire [146/16]

7. Marriage Story [141/15]

8. Pain and Glory [107/12]

9. A Hidden Life [98/9]

10. Transit [95/10]

11. Us [94.5/10]

12. Knives Out [92/11]

13. Ash Is Purest White [90.5/9]

14. The Lighthouse [87/10]

15. Atlantics [83/9]

16. Dolemite Is My Name [82/10]

17. The Farewell [74/8]

18. The Souvenir [72/7]

19. Ad Astra [62/7]

20. 1917 [62/5]

21. Her Smell [61/7]

22. High Life [59/8]

23. Dragged Across Concrete [58/5]

24. The Last Black Man in San Francisco [57/6]

25. Asako I & II [47.5/5]

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2019 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown - #2

“One of the common knocks against Martin Scorsese's The Irishman* is that it's just another Scorsese gangster movie; he isn't doing anything he hasn't done before in Mean Streets or Goodfellas or The Departed. But that's exactly the point: The Irishman is every Scorsese movie, the culmination of his career up to this point. This movie has everything: mobsters with funny nicknames, gangland hits, '60s doo-wop, institutional corruption, David Ferrie...

“What this film demonstrates is that as much as Scorsese's career has been about depicting his Italian-American heritage and men who feel inarticulate frustration and guilt, it has even more been about chronicling the moral history of the United States in the postwar era, and our common inability to reckon with said history. If you met Frank Sheeran socially, you would probably think he was a stand-up guy, a hard worker, a devoted husband and father, a staunch union man. But the rot is in plain sight for anyone who wants to see it: Sheeran is also a war criminal, an adulterer, a corrupt Teamster official, the murderer of one of his best friends.

“Robert De Niro's Sheeran is all of these things totally, inextricably, as a result of the simple, circumstantial, day-to-day choices he finds himself making over the course of the movie's 60 years. And his inability to understand what exactly it is that has happened in his life, the terrible things he's been responsible for and the numerous lives he's impacted, matches our own collective lack of understanding, intellectually and emotionally, for where we are in the world today and how we got here. The movie's slow pace and deliberateness are the traits of a film made by an old man, but the boiling rage underneath, the desire to grab Frank Sheeran, or Travis Bickle, or Henry Hill, or Jordan Belfort, and yell at them ‘WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?’ is the consistent anger that has driven Scorsese's career.

“Of course if you want to send a message you go to Western Union, which is why Scorsese's other great talent, as an entertainer, is on full display in this film, with a rollicking screenplay by Steven Zaillian, perfect editing by Thelma Schoonmaker, and peak performances from De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, among others. You could be forgiven for calling it a bloated whale of a film (during its 209 minutes you could watch both Boxcar Bertha and The King of Comedy and still have time for The Big Shave), but it's the kind of carefully crafted epic that few other filmmakers could or would make today, and in its subtle accumulation of guilt and regret it's one of the greatest American films of the decade.

“*One could say that the correct title is I Heard You Paint Houses, and I would politely disagree.”

~ Jeff McMahon

2019 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown - #3

“If we take him at his word that Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is indeed to be Quentin Tarantino’s penultimate picture, one could hardly find a fonder farewell to the industry he’s been rocking since the early 1990s. I find it the most emotional of the writer-director’s work, suffused with a twilight longing and affection unguarded by irony. Indeed, for those of us who came of age with Tarantino films, there’s perhaps an extra-texual level of poignancy to the movie’s middle-aged resignation. (The director himself got married and had a kid upon completing it, American cinema’s enfant terrible surrendering at last to the adult domesticity that he’d long held at bay, a similar fate perhaps not coincidentally looming at the end of the road for our washed-up TV cowboy Rick Dalton.)

“The alcoholic, has-been actor and his erstwhile, unemployable stuntman are relics in a town and a time that have passed them by. The streets are full of ‘goddamn hippies’ and their careers remanded to ‘Eye-talian Westerns,’ a longtime partnership soon to be scuttled by plans to sell the house and move to a condo in Toluca Lake. And then there’s Sharon, a beacon of goodness and light next door – one we all know too well is about to be snuffed out in the cruelest way imaginable.

“Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Bruce Lee, James Stacy, Roman Polanski, Steve McQueen, there aren’t many happy endings for any of the real-life figures depicted herein. The most moving moments for me are the film’s evening montages, whether it’s the sun going down to the sound of Jose Feliciano’s ‘California Dreamin’’ or the achingly lovely parade of neon signs clicking on at dusk while the Stones sing ‘Out of Time.’ All good things will soon come to an end, and probably sooner than you think. Yet this time it’s a surprisingly ridiculous, unexpectedly cathartic and ultimately melancholy finale. Because that’s what happens in the movies.” ~ Sean Burns

2019 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown - #4

Are Diamonds Forever? Uncut Gems and My Existential Crisis

“I never thought a film about basketball gambling would be one of the most spiritual film-watching experiences of my life. But it happened.

“When I worked in Manhattan for a huge corporation I would sometimes get falafel in the diamond district near my office. I remember walking down these tiled hallways connecting blocks, men with eye loupes gazing deeply into jewelry. It felt like I was in some secret city. It also felt like illegalities were feverishly burning just below the surface of every surface. I would also go to this area to buy expensive shoes that were far too underpriced. Stolen? Fakes? I don’t know. But it was a culture I benefitted from and chose not to look too closely at for fear of seeing my own reflection in the human-rat-race of status and wealth that the entire island continues to be subsumed by. My heart rate climbed, my breath shortened as I saw the planes of familiarity in the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems, an endless circle of futile climbing and falling, climbing and falling.

“In the opening of the film one is taken through a metaphysical whirlwind— a precious gemstone, through the cosmos, into a colonoscopy (I can’t explain it, just see it). Birth, life, death, nature, science, spirit collapsed all in barely the first few minutes of the film. Daniel Lopatin’s soundtrack adds to the otherworldly, providing a throbbing digital atmosphere of another ethereal space we’ve all crowded into. A war between elegant beauty— like each carefully set diamond on a gem-emblazoned Furby, or the perfect basketball shot— and utter chaos (no spoilers), battling in search of some kind of order or meaning or sense to the pulsating, relentless, maddening human experience. The whole film asking: What and why do you worship?

“I am pretty sure I once sat (eating a falafel) near the very fountain Adam Sandler gets thrown into in Uncut Gems which sent a deeper pang of recognition to tap on my shoulder, my memory of my own implication in the cycle of ‘winning.’ For me, the film became a stark, recognizable portrait of the faded, fabled ‘American Dream’ hawked in stores and media throughout the globe. The film looks at money and power searching for something more— some semblance of connection, hope, some divine intervention boiling underneath it all. Though Oscar sweeper Parasite deals with some similar issues, Uncut Gems was overlooked because the mirror it creates scares the hell out of everyone in America; Gems doesn’t sugar coat with the same kind of cartoonishness as Parasite that makes the looming issues seem just a little unreal, just a tiny bit foreign, slightly ‘over there’ and not ‘in here.’ Uncut Gems is a neverending punch in the face reminding that even if it seems like life can be gamed, it can’t. Even if we live in a country where one thinks every single thing can be bought, inexplicable, divine moments of purpose are never actually for sale. ~ Donna Kozloskie

2019 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown - #5

“Nancy Drew. Scarlett O'Hara. Scout Finch. Elizabeth Bennet. Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Each is unquestionably a charter inductee of the American Literary Heroines Hall of Fame, with each in their own way worthy being counterparts of the iconic Lady of Letters, Canadian Anne Shirley. Yet no less an enduring phenomenon is Jo March, who first appeared on the literary landscape in 1869 courtesy of Bostonian Louisa May Alcott. A kind of feminine treatise as spirited as Helen Reddy's song ‘I Am Woman’ and containing the defiant bravado of Virginia Woolf, Little Women, the novel showcasing the heroine's ascendancy to gender equality, has been one of the cinema's most attended literary properties, dating back to the silent era and including the beloved 1933 George Cukor adaptation starring Katherine Hepburn and a rightly venerated 1994 version directed by Gillian Armstrong and featuring Winona Ryder as the irascible lead. One of the country's finest contemporary female directors, Greta Gerwig won rapturous praise -even from Armstrong herself- for what must surely be counted as the most profound examination of Alcott's timeless work- one that expanded the physical parameters and has offered up some character revisions that have deepened the context and accentuated the atmosphere.

“First off, Gerwig opted to shoot the film in the area where Alcott lived, namely Concord, Mass with its ravishing autumnal color palette and scenic resplendence including the trademark fireplace and dinner table congregation for a Christmas lunch. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, composer Alexandre Desplat and Oscar winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran pressed all the right buttons to insure a sensory immersion to guard against any potential plotting convolutions. Despite a tiny minority taking issue with the film's ‘structure’ fans of Gerwig's revisionist opus were by and large elated with the central character’s metamorphosis from a love-struck novice in the way of the world to a fearless author proudly declaring her worthwhile negotiating her maiden publishing venture, which Gerwig poses as a much more satisfying finale than any romantic consummation.

“Though awards groups have chosen elsewhere for ensemble honors one need not look further than the dream cast Gerwig showcases headed by Saoirse Ronan as the incorrigible, rebellious Jo, in one of the year's best performances in any acting category; Florence Pugh (Amy) who transcends the character's previous incarnation as a spoiled and bratty child to become more well-rounded and a potential foil to Jo. Gerwig's Little Women it can be persuasively argued, is as much Amy's story as Jo's and Pugh (also superlative in Lady Macbeth and Midsommar) in her Oscar-nominated performance exudes a radiance as a gifted 23-year-old who seems much older and yearns for experience. It is of no small wonder that the normally exceptional Emma Watson (Meg) and Eliza Scanlen (Beth) are pushed to the background by the very comparative nature of their roles. Meryl Streep as the spangled Aunt March is typically splendid; Timothée Chalamet in another role that has both girls and boys fawning enters the costumed sphere with comprehensive appeal as Laurie the next door neighbor Jo ironically loves so much that she balks at marrying him; Chris Cooper delivers another extraordinary turn as a melancholic grandfather, and Laura Dern in her somewhat less famous 2019 performance. but one just as accomplished, brings her typical thespian command as the loving Marmee, whose role in life is to sacrifice.

“In the end Gerwig (like Quentin Tarantino in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, who ‘avenged’ the Manson family murders) brings full justice to Ms. Alcott's compromised ending with a free-spirited coda that should be an inspiration for future generations. This is the Little Women in thought, word and deed that has done the book's author the sturdiest measure of justice and it is unquestionably one of the very best films of 2019.” ~ Sam Juliano

2019 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown - #6

“Ever since Laura Mulvey coined the phrase ‘male gaze,’ people have been theorizing about what its female counterpart could look like. In Portrait de la jeune fille et feu, Céline Sciamma simply show us – not in an academic, theoretical way, but in an emotional, moving, sensual way.

“The key scene happens later in the movie, once the subterfuge has been abandoned, and the three women – painter Marianne, subject Héloïse, and maid Sophie – form a temporary all-female community. So far the main ‘gaze’ shown on screen has the one Marianne trains on Héloïse, scrutinizing her to find out how to fix her essence in paint. But then Héloïse shows Marianne – and thus, us – that she’s been looking back, all along.

“There are many elements in this movie that show the hand of a female filmmaker, not least of them the everyday portrayal of an abortion, a chubby baby playing nearby. But perhaps this is Sciamma’s most radical statement: that to truly provide a viable alternative for the male gaze, it is not sufficient to look at different things, in different ways; it is not enough that the gazer is female, or even that the audience is presumed to be. It is only by allowing the gaze her own point of view that old ways of looking can really be subverted.

“Portrait de la jeune fille en feu – odd, that the title was translated as the more generic-sounding ‘Portrait of a lady on fire,’ when the literal translation is closer to ‘Portrait of the young woman on fire’ – would probably have been my favorite film of 2019 even without this scene. It is so tenderly and gorgeously filmed, so acutely observed, so achingly romantic. But that scene is one of a few that make this a movie more than just a beautiful love story; but also hopefully an inspiration to future filmmakers of any gender.” ~ Hedwig van Driel

2019 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown - #7

“Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently went viral with a tweet complaining that Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story should really have been titled Divorce Story, and beyond Tyson’s usual dour literalism, the tweet points to a way that it could be easy for audiences to reduce the movie’s narrative to a simple binary choice. Is this a marriage story or a divorce story? Should we side with husband Charlie (Adam Driver) or wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson)? Who wins and who loses? There have been passionate online arguments in favor of both Charlie and Nicole as the film’s ‘true’ protagonist, but one of the best things about Marriage Story is that way that Baumbach steps aside and lets the characters speak for themselves (through the fantastic, resonant performances by both lead actors).

“That starts from the very beginning, with narration of the two reading letters describing what they love about each other, opening the movie on a note of warmth and positivity, before recriminations and pettiness set in. That Charlie and Nicole decline to actually read those letters aloud creates a moment of bitter irony, but it also allows for the rush of emotions at the end of the movie, when Nicole’s letter returns in a way that points toward a future of compassion and understanding for the couple. In the middle, both characters behave reprehensibly at times, but they both also navigate a scary and intimidating process with the intention of doing what’s best for their young son.

“If there’s a villain in Marriage Story, it’s the divorce industry itself, and even the shark-like lawyers played by Ray Liotta and Oscar-winner Laura Dern seem caught up in a system out of their control. Marriage Story synthesizes the caustic emotions of some of Baumbach’s darkest films (including The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding) with the exuberant humor of his collaborations with partner Greta Gerwig on Frances Ha and Mistress America. Marriage Story is emotionally devastating at times (memes of its intense, tear-filled central fight have also gone viral), but it’s also funny and even heartwarming, or at least bittersweet, especially in the separate scenes of Charlie and Nicole breaking into songs from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. Neil deGrasse Tyson may want to put a label on it, but the movie, like all genuine human relationships, can never be reduced that easily. ~ Josh Bell